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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25893946">#testimonials</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew'>grainjew</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doctor Who</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Dr Nyarlathotep, Episode: 2017 Xmas Twice Upon a Time, Ficlet Collection, Gen, Nonbinary Doctor (Doctor Who), adheres to season 6b fugitive doctor theory if that matters to anyone, the hand of omega is just a weird dog you heard it here first folks, turns out that literally everything i write is secretly about timeless children</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 11:28:34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,142</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25893946</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>There is a child. This child is new to the universe, and shapeless, formless, boundless, and seeing another creature: the child sees, and recognizes <i>alike</i>, and then the child has two legs and two arms and one head and three-four dimensions and the word <i>she</i>.<br/>Hello, child, says the creature, who is called <i>she</i>, and who is called Tecteun, and who is called explorer, and who is using her mouth to speak. Are you lost? Do you have a name?<br/></p>
</blockquote>An eldritch!Doctor snippet for every title given by the Testimony.
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>50</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>#testimonials</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lynse/gifts">Lynse</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>for lynse, because by some miracle our once-every-five-years event of sharing a fandom managed to fall near your birthday. happy approximate birthday my friend!</p><p>some parts of this were inspired by seventh doctor novel sky pirates! by dave stone because i am just slightly obsessed with seventh doctor novel sky pirates! by dave stone. more generally i owe my life to the dr nyarlathotep fandom for (1) existing in a way that meant i could lurk in its tags, (2) informing me thereby that eldritch!doctor is a thing that exists for me to fall in love with, and (3) informing me thereby that seventh doctor novel sky pirates! by dave stone is a thing that exists and is delightful. so thank you all, you have brought me so much joy the past few months!!!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>There is a child. This child is new to the universe, and shapeless, formless, boundless, and seeing another creature: the child sees, and recognizes <em>alike,</em> and then the child has two legs and two arms and one head and three-four dimensions and the word <em>she.</em></p><p>Hello, child, says the creature, who is called <em>she</em>, and who is called Tecteun, and who is called explorer, and who is using her mouth to speak. Are you lost? Do you have a name?</p><p>The child has a mouth, has-had. She tries to speak with it, but she misses. She says in the air, I don't know.</p><p>The creature who is called Tecteun flinches with her arms and chest, and then uses her mouth to smile, and then takes the child home.</p><p> </p><p>I: The Destroyer of Worlds</p><p>The Doctor is kind. The Doctor is kind, and congenial. The Doctor is even benevolent—<br/>  —but the Doctor will not be bound, and the Doctor has too many teeth to be human.</p><p>The Doctor is free of bounds, free of bounds, free of bounds—<br/> —the Doctor is tripping over xer scarf, bright, bright, bright, the sky bursting, the Doctor has</p><p>The Doctor is smiling. Sarah Jane thinks, how many teeth you have, grandmother—<br/>  — the Doctor smiles more. You see: the Doctor is no longer soft velvet, the Doctor is no longer confined. This Doctor is shadows, and freedom, and teeth.<br/>The Doctor is free: of exile, of consequences, of the effort of form—</p><p>  —the Doctor's shadow is long, and the Doctor has too many teeth. And sometimes, the Doctor takes a wrong step, and a world that should have shone crumbles to powder: and the Doctor doesn't notice, or stop to mourn.</p><p> </p><p>II: The Imp of the Pandorica</p><p>Storms are portent-shadowed things. Bones ache at their coming, old scars give up their shadow-pain, the air hangs heavy with expectance— and then the storm crests the horizon, roiling, and those forewarned say, Ah.</p><p>And so it is with the Doctor.</p><p>Ze is a many-dimensional stormcloud made flesh, a creature of shifting and reshaping, a ceaseless thing that once upon a time, beyond memory, saw hirself in something small and self-contained and told hirself: cease. The Doctor is a portent-shadowed thing, whose presence in a <em>timeplace</em> writes itself back and forth across the firmament, suspending moments to hang heavy in time and anchoring places to pull weight towards them in space, who catalyzes events into happening and <em>having-happened</em>, who makes undeniable fact that ze is known, and remembered, and trusted.</p><p>The Daleks know this. The Daleks named hir Oncoming Storm.</p><p>And when the Daleks are invited to trick and trap and contain hir whose words topple empires like a scything wind, to capture hir before ze can consume the universe and spit out its bones, they say: Look to the ache of your ruined plans, and there you will find the Storm.</p><p> </p><p>III: The Shadow of the Valeyard</p><p>The Valeyard touched the Doctor.</p><p>   The Valeyard touched the Doctor, and watched as the Doctor's colors darkened like ink dripped in water.</p><p>      The Valeyard touched the Doctor, and the Blinovitch Limitation Effect sighed and looks the other way, and the Doctor recoiled into themself.</p><p>         The Doctor recoiled, and choked on bile, and felt themself buffeted by hatred and loneliness and rage and <em>so much loathing</em> of [(child)-other-thetasigma-doctor-valeyard]. And the touch sent weight like tar through the Doctor's veins, spread, spread spread, ceaseless, past the bounds of physicality, pulling and tugging and staining at their form-beyond-form, pinks to deep rust, feathers to steel, and it hurts, it <em>hurts, </em>it's scarring and it <em>hurts</em>—</p><p>      The Valeyard touched the Doctor, and the Matrix trembled.</p><p>   The Valeyard touched the Doctor, and became a paradox, an inevitability, a looping self-referential tear in the Doctor's timeline.</p><p>The Valeyard touched the Doctor.</p><p>And the Valeyard smiled, and was named real.</p><p> </p><p>IV: The Beast of Trenzalore</p><p>There was a crack between dimensions, and on the other side of the crack, there was a monster. They could feel the monster's presence brush so close to the crack, sometimes, oppressive, devouring, feral. They could feel his gaze, his attention. His weariness (but could a monster be weary?) and his disdain (but of whom was he disdainful?). They could feel him, waiting.</p><p>There was a monster, there was a beast, there was a creature-that-lurked, and the Time Lords named him Doctor, and prayed they were right, and prayed they were wrong, and prayed they were heard.</p><p>He has always come back to us, this monster of ours, said the Time Lords.</p><p>Their Lord President, who had never quite abandoned the trappings of divinity, stood, hand hovering over the crack, gaze fixed on it.</p><p>You are our creature, he said, resplendent in Prydonian scarlet. You will give us your name, and you will lead us home.</p><p>The monster's presence ignored him.</p><p>You are our creature, he said, and in his words were the echoes of life unending. You owe it to us. You will bring us home.</p><p>The monster's presence fixed a roof for one of the tiny sentiences it preferred to its own kind, and did not answer.</p><p>You are our creature, said Rassilon the Resurrected, Patris of the Vortex, Ravager of the Void, Conqueror of Yssgaroth, Founder of Gallifrey, who had one day watched Tecteun step out of her craft with a child clinging to her hand. We gave you a home. Give us your name, and a direction.</p><p>The monster, who was the Doctor, who was old now, and tired, and selfish enough to unerase Gallifrey but not so naive as to put it back in the sky, said, You will keep away from this-my-home.</p><p>He said, This-planet Trenzalore will not die by your hands, or mine.</p><p>They said, We can wait.</p><p>He said, So can I.</p><p>,</p><p>There was a prison, and that prison cracked and fell open and let out a monster. Eir body filled the air, all curved in on itself, ancient and heavy and twisted with the weight of four billion years, and for a moment the breadth of it blotted out the stars and silenced the winds and shuttered the suns. For a moment, screams echoed from Arcadia to Lake Abydos, and silver leaves on slender trees dripped blood, and the glow of regeneration sparked and spread across city streets, licked up the glass of the Capitol's dome.</p><p>And then the Doctor was picking eir confession dial up off the ground, and the wind was blowing, and e had two legs and two arms and one head and four dimensions, and there was a child approaching em, face stained bright with tears.</p><p>The Doctor looked at the child, and saw eyes blown wide, and lips bloody from a bitten tongue, and remembered that e also had a mouth, and said with it, Tell them I'm back.</p><p>The child nodded, and fled, and couldn't find the voice to say, We already know.</p><p>You see: Even among Time Lords, who could see in four dimensions and negotiate with gravity like an old friend, the Doctor had always been just that little bit <em>off,</em> just that little bit Other. Even among Time Lords, the Doctor fully unwound was a shape incomprehensible. And among Time Lords, the Doctor had grown up unaware of this, despite who-had-been-Ushas's wide-eyed fascination and who-had-been-Koschei's wide-eyed captivation.</p><p>Still half-unspun, half-unwound, half-unshaped, still threading eirself back together out of steady rage, the Doctor arrived preceded by portents at an old barn, and e called down silence, and e called down Rassilon.</p><p>And silence fell, and Rassilon came.</p><p>You are my creature, said Rassilon, who had merely one head, and two legs, and two arms, and four dimensions, and who thought that smallness exemplary. And by that right I shall kill you.</p><p>The Doctor, named monster, named warrior, named life unending, said, Get off my planet.</p><p>And Rassilon heard: You will keep away from this-my-home, which I now usurp from you.</p><p>And Rassilon saw: His people, Gallifrey-born and Gallifrey-Loomed Time Lords all, betray him-their-creator for that foreign little creature Tecteun had led home one day.</p><p>And Rassilon knew: In this story, the monster won.</p><p>And Rassilon fled.</p><p> </p><p>V: The Butcher of Skull Moon</p><p>The Doctor is called the Butcher of Skull Moon, because on Skull Moon it killed personally.</p><p>There was a resistance, you see. There were Daleks, but there was a resistance, the indigenous peoples of the moon with their bodies like turquoise and jet, and immigrants from a thousand worlds who had in various timelines called its unforgiving landscape home. The Doctor-Who-Was-Not-The-Doctor was helping them, even though the Time Lords wanted the system it inhabited and the weapon the Daleks were testing there wiped from every timeline.</p><p>But the Doctor-Who-Was-Not-The-Doctor was helping them, had befriended them even, had won the trust of their leader, who was brave and good and young. They were laughing, they were talking, they had hope- and then a Dalek weapon flashed, and the leader jumped in front of the Doctor-Who-Was-Not-The-Doctor, and xe died and died and died, blue and black swirling together on rocky, bony ground.</p><p>The Doctor-Who-Was-Not-The-Doctor saw xer cut timelines blossom and fall, ungrown. It saw xem unraveled, saw the universe rewritten around xer absence- And it felt rage.</p><p>What happened next was later called a massacre, or a butchery, but in the crystal-sharded moment of its happening it was the apocalypse.</p><p>Curses, retroactively woven in that moment into bloodlines generations ago, took effect. Dalek instruments malfunctioned, resistance instruments malfunctioned, paranoia became transmissible as a fast-acting and deadly virus that killed with bullets in hearts. Colors saturated, sounds distended. And through it all, a threshing of star-edged limbs flashed and cut and sucked, unthinking.</p><p>The Doctor-Who-Was-Not-The-Doctor split open timelines and sipped from them, and felt what was once Zagreus tilt its chin, considering. It unwound and rewound, seeking flesh, seeking bone, replaying the deaths of Daleks to see the splatter of their timelines blossom in color across its time-sense. It made things, too, piling matter and bone, and then scattered the scraps through Skull Moon's timeline, where they speared through the first turquoise-and-jet people before they could even develop a language. But mostly it stretched, back and forth in more than four dimensions, and where it touched, there was an unraveling.</p><p>And then, finally, less than a linear second after the resistance leader leader died, the moon was silent, and had always been silent.</p><p>And the Doctor-Who-Was-Not-The-Doctor stepped back into its tiny body, and called its timeship-wife, and left.</p><p> </p><p>VI: The Last Tree of Garsennon</p><p>The Doctor hides among trees. Garsennon's forests grow tall, tall, tall, fog-drenched, rain-drenched, wrapped all the way around the planet like a lush and quilted blanket, cut and shaped by glittering waterways. The spider-people string their spun-silver cities across the canopies, and Vashta Nerada cluster together under overhanging leaves, captured and consumed by the shadow-people of the forest floor. It is a busy place, Garsennon, a life-drenched place and a color-layered place, a place for the Doctor to step out of her TARDIS and bless the randomizer and lean up against a tree and mourn.</p><p>She met her future self, and the thought thrums, ceaseless. Lee died, Lee was killed for her sake— and she met her future self. These are the pillars of the day, the moments she holds tight in her hands and clings to as her memory flickers and fades to protect the timeline. Lee, who faked his death to flee the Celestial Intervention Agency with her, died on her account— and she met her future self.</p><p>Even among the weeds of spreading amnesia, she knows <em>knows knows </em>this other Doctor could not be her past, <em>had</em> to be future, because when the Doctor had finally looked, that other Doctor's timeline had been so sickeningly twisted and knotted and gnarled that the Doctor had wanted to be sick, and their  eyes had been older than the Doctor could begin to comprehend. Older, far older, so impossibly older, the shape of them unfolding in a way that reminded the Doctor more of a TARDIS than any Time Lord she'd ever met. Older. She would grow that old, and Lee, kind, loyal, steadfast, would not.</p><p>The Doctor shuts her eyes, and at a steady walk lets the forest eat her.</p><p>It obliges.</p><p>Thorns claw like sickles at her skin; vines catch and tug and send her falling; insects draw alien blood and collapse. She stumbles and throws herself at bark and tastes blood in her mouth and staggers on and doesn't get mauled by Garsennon's stalking shadow-coated predators and—</p><p>Opens her eyes to a clearing. There are flowers, here, in all their reds and purples and ultraviolets, and there is a buzzing in the air, and the trees reach tall and slate around her, and something in her calms, something angry and hurt and trapped catches the scent of flowers and sees something quiet and slithering go its way and feels the sun, warm, hanging heavy and lethargic. She stands, and watches the lightless pulse of a creeper vine. Once, she would have pulled her recorder from a pocket and played the plants a lullaby, but this body can't hold a tune.</p><p>Instead, she stands, and she stands, and the sun falls and climbs and falls again, and rain brushes her face, and Garsennon turns beneath her, and she grows roots, she grows moss, she grows stillness. She stands, and the spider-people anchor the threads of their cities to her, and the fogs embrace her, and the Vashta Nerada shelter beneath her, and she stands there, and the world moves around her.</p><p>And, stilled, stopped, quiet with a tree's quietude— she stands there as an illegal mining project drags Garsennon too close to its sun. She stands there as the fogs evaporate, as the endless trunks dehydrate, as sparks wake into flames. She stands there as hungry wildfires glut themselves on the landscape, and then she stands among ash and bone, steady and tall, tall, tall, rooted in broken soil, brushed by cinders, alone.</p><p>She is a tree, the last tree standing on Garsennon, and when Gat finally finds her, she realizes that she has forgotten how to run.</p><p> </p><p>VII: The Destroyer of Skaro</p><p>The Hand of Omega giggled. You are Other! it said, burbling, and the Doctor smiled at it.</p><p>
  <em>Come, follow me, says the Doctor. But be silent. We're running away from home.</em>
  <br/>
  <em>I remember! says the Hand, but silently. I remember, I remember!</em>
</p><p>The Doctor absentmindedly stroked at it, as he flipped a page of his book and practiced a new juggling pattern. They were walking through the streets of some sleepy village named Millipede Crossing (and there had not yet been a single millipede to be seen; how disappointing) because it was hardly right for the Hand to be cooped up inside the TARDIS all the time. Benny was always on about how one acquired responsibilities when one acquired a pet. He <em>did</em> listen to her sometimes.<br/>Perhaps I am, he said.</p><p><em>I'm sure you do, says the Doctor, just as silent. Sneaking out of Gallifrey has been a whole affair, and it doesn't need more complicating than a lost Founder-era weapon insisting on accompanying it and its granddaughter.</em><br/><em>I remember you, I remember! insists the Hand, trailing out a whisper of </em>self <em>to circle round the Doctor like a misty hug. You said, tomorrow, you said— and now it's tomorrow!</em></p><p>The path ended at a sheer cliff. The locals who saw them found that they had an unaccountable fifteen-minute gap in their memories, later, and could not for the life of them describe how the strange little man and his inexplicably floating box had gotten up the cliff and into the nature preserve.</p><p>
  <em>We've never spoken before today, says the Doctor, absently. Its granddaughter is supposed to be waiting up ahead, and it's trying to spot her. It can't spare the focus to keep up a conversation, even with the genuine Hand of Omega.</em>
  <br/>
  <em>We have, we have! insists the Hand. You were Other then, all different-shaped and different-named, but you said we'd play tomorrow. So I waited, and now it's tomorrow!</em>
</p><p>They sat on a log. There was a river below them, and the Doctor had wanted to perch over it and watch the whorls and patterns of its current, so there had been a log.<br/>Fondly, absently, the Doctor stroked the lid of the coffin. Insects buzzed. The Hand reached out a tongue of mist and snatched a damselfly out of the air.<br/>Hey, put that back, scolded the Doctor, voice mild.<br/>The Hand put it back. It was glowing. The Doctor sighed, and wondered idly what a Hand of Omega-empowered damselfly would do to the local ecosystem.</p><p>
  <em>You must be confusing me for someone else, insists the Doctor. It tries to ignore the weapon's delight shattering into quiet hurt. Oh, there's my granddaughter; perhaps you met her?</em>
</p><p>Are we friends? asked the Hand, perfectly in time with a forlorn gusting of wind. I remember when we were friends! And then you weren't.<br/>The Doctor hummed a phrase of song in a pitch beyond Gallifreyan hearing, and it trilled back the next line, joyful, burbling.<br/>He said, and smiled at it with six eyes: Forever and ever.</p><p> </p><p>VIII: The Doctor of War</p><p>They shut their eyes, a moment, and they speak: a string of names; an apology; last words, despairing, angry: Physician, heal thyself.</p><p>The Doctor lifts the chalice; drinks. The world takes a breath. Exhales.</p><p>And every one of Ohila's senses go dark.</p><p>Time-sense comes back first, and there is something like a cluster of moments where the Doctor had been, like the space-time continuum has been turned in upon itself. Hearing, and there is a sound-beyond-sound raging at her ears, demanding entry. Scent, and the air is acrid. Taste, and the air is acrid. Balance, and she can hardly stand. Sight, and her vision flickers, or the light flickers, or the wall flickers, or nothing flickers at all except the Doctor, who is there and not-there in the same instant, who has remade themself into something into something primal, something impossible, something all knots and edges and aberrations, something which makes her want to fall gibbering to the floor and cry until her eyes bleed dust. Something which is a weapon, and which is Death.</p><p>Doctor no more, it says, and its voice is split in twain, and it is a thing of forms unbound, and Ohila prays to Pythia that it remembers something - <em>anything </em>- of who it used to be.</p><p> </p><p>Post-Script: The Testimony</p><p>"To be fair, they cut out all the jokes," says the Doctor.</p><p>The Doctor looks at em, at the soft shimmer of regeneration trapped just under eir skin, and it hopes very, very much that e is telling the truth.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>the fact that I happened to have the idea for this fic only a day after I compiled a comprehensive list of my pronoun headcanons for the doctors was sheer coincidence but it did mean I could then put those headcanons into action, and it also means that if you want the rationale behind any pronoun decisions that appeared here (or are interested in the rest of the of the list), I will be happy to elucidate in the comments!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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